‘By a virus,’ Li said, remembering Margaret’s spoken thoughts.
Yang smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Viruses could do it. There could be other factors. But the point is, that once activated, it is possible that they could be responsible for some very dangerous human diseases.’
Li began to see a glimmer of light. ‘Like thickening of the microvasculature of the heart?’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose so,’ Yang said, and began himself to see the first glimmers of light.
Li said, ‘And you’re saying someone has…genetically modified these HERV?’
‘It appears that some of them had been removed from our swimmer, modified in some way, and then put back.’
‘Why?’
Yang shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have absolutely no clue, Section Chief. And neither has Professor Xu.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But I have an idea that Margaret might.’
Li said grimly, ‘If I knew where she was I’d ask her.’
Yang frowned, but he had no chance to ask.
‘Thank you,’ Li said, and he tapped Tao’s arm and nodded towards the Jeep. ‘Get in.’
Tao looked surprised. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Detective Sun’s apartment.’
IV
The van lurched and bounced over a frozen, rutted track. From the rear of it, where Margaret and Lili had been tied hand and foot and forced to sit with their backs to the door, Margaret could see headlights raking a grim, winter landscape. The skeletons of cold, black trees drifted in and out of vision. Big, soft snowflakes slapped the windshield before being scraped aside and smeared across the glass by inefficient wipers.
She was racked by pain now, and knew she was in serious trouble. She felt blood, hot and wet, between her legs, and every bone-jarring pitch of the van provoked a fresh fork of cramp in her belly. Lili was absolutely silent, but Margaret could feel her fear.
The only sound which had broken the monotonous drone of the engine during their journey was the whimpering of the man Margaret had set on fire. She could smell his burned flesh and singed hair. He lay curled up in the back, almost within touching distance, wrapped in a blanket. Margaret suspected it was fear more than pain which made him cry. His burns were severe enough to have destroyed the nerve-endings. It was possible he felt no pain at all. But he must know he would be disfigured for life.
When they had dragged her from the copper pot, they pushed her to the ground and kicked her until she thought they were going to kill her there and then. She had curled into the foetal position to try to protect her baby. They did not care that she was pregnant. Eventually they had dragged the two women to the Donghua Gate and bundled them into the back of the waiting van. Margaret thought they must have been on the road for more than an hour and a half since then.
She saw brick buildings and slate roofs now, walls and gates, the occasional light in a window. Stacks of bricks at the roadside. Pipes projected from the sides of houses, issuing smoke into the night sky. Margaret could smell the woodsmoke. They were going through a village of some kind. Margaret had no sense of the direction they had taken when they left the capital. They could be anywhere. But wherever it was, she knew, there was no chance that anyone was ever going to find them there. After a few minutes, they left the village behind, and entered a dense copse of trees before emerging again into open country. A solitary light shone in the blackness, and gradually it grew brighter as they got closer, before the van finally juddered to a halt outside the gate of a walled cottage. The double green gates stood open, and the light they had seen was an outside lamp above the door of what appeared to be an L-shaped bungalow.
The driver and his passenger opened the van doors and jumped down. After a moment the back doors were thrown open, and Margaret and Lili nearly fell out into the snow. Rough hands grabbed them and pulled them out into the freezing night. Margaret was bruised and aching, and the joints in her legs had seized up, buckling under her. She could barely stand. The two men crouched in the snow to untie their feet, and they were led through the gate, along a winding path to the door of the cottage. Margaret could see that the red brick dwelling had been renovated some time recently. The windows were a freshly painted green, the garden trimmed and manicured beneath a layer of snow. Gourds hung drying from the eaves and the orange of frozen persimmons lined the window ledges.
The door was unlocked and the two women were pushed through it into a small sitting room. One of the men flicked a switch, and a harsh yellow light threw the room into sharp relief. Whitewashed walls, rugs strewn across the tiled floor, a couple of old couches, a writing bureau, a round dining table under one of the windows looking out on to the garden. Two wooden chairs with woven straw seats were brought in from another room, and Margaret and Lily were forced to sit in them, side by side. Their feet were tied again, and their hands untied and then re-tied to the backs of the chairs.
The men who had brought them in had an urgent conversation in low voices, and one of them went out to the garden to make a call on his cellphone. After a few minutes, he returned and waved his friend to follow him. The second man switched off the light as he left. Margaret and Lili heard the engine of the van coughing into life, and the whine of the gears as it reversed and slithered through a three-point turn before accelerating off into the night, its headlights dying into blackness.
It was some minutes before Margaret found the ability to speak. ‘What did they say?’ she asked, and was surprised at how feeble her voice sounded in the dark.
‘They take their friend for medical treatment. The one who is burned. The driver talk to someone on the phone who say they will be here soon.’ Lili’s voice sounded very small, too.
The ropes were burning into Margaret’s wrists and ankles, and she knew there was no chance of freeing them. They sat, then, in silence for what seemed like hours, but may have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. And then Lili began sobbing, softly, uncontrollably. She knew they were going to die. As Margaret did. Margaret closed her eyes and felt her own tears burn hot tracks down her cheeks. But they were more for her lost child than for herself.
After, perhaps, another ten minutes, they saw lights catch the far wall of the cottage through the side windows, and they heard the distant purr of a motor. As it grew closer, so Margaret’s fear increased. She tried hard to free her hands, but only succeeded in burning the skin down to raw flesh.
The vehicle drew up outside the gate. The headlights went out, and then they heard three doors bang shut. Footsteps crunched in the snow, and Margaret turned her head towards the door as it opened. The overhead light, when it came on, nearly blinded her, and a man she recognised as Doctor Hans Fleischer walked in. He wore a camel-hair coat with a silk scarf and leather gloves, and his suntan made him seem incongruous here, implausibly prosperous. He beamed at the two women, and then focused his gaze on Margaret. ‘Doctor Campbell, I presume,’ he said. ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ His English was almost accentless.
Another man came in behind him. Chinese, much younger, immaculately dressed.